Enjoy Your Planet.2

This one stays on the sky.  I haven't seen a sky this starry in many years.  Hard to believe there are places where it can still be seen.  Once again, best seen on a big screen.  And once again, I could do with a little less time lapse and some longer scenes, it goes by too fast.  But beautiful anyway.

Alienating

Robert Reich makes the case that what the economy needs is good paying middle class jobs, which require strong unions, and not necessarily manufacturing jobs, which aren't "coming back" anyway, at least in the large numbers of yesteryear.  I think he's right, and his points are worth exploring further.

So there are two points: unions and manufacturing.  Unionization in the past couple of decades has been most successful in the public sector, which is largely why GOPers are attacking public sector unionization.  Public sector and civil service jobs have been the backbone of especially the non-white middle class (another reason for the Grand Old White Party to attack them.)  How to successfully unionize people who work in offices etc. is a challenge that should be more widely and deeply discussed.  In my own experience, I was a lonely management supporter of unionizing efforts at the Boston Phoenix a very long time ago (I was a managing editor) but I was doubtful that aligning such a union with the United Electrical Workers would really work.  Newspaper jobs are very different from electrical workers jobs.  I assume those problems have been addressed since, but since few office jobs are actually unionized, maybe not well enough.

Reich's point about manufacturing jobs not coming back is based not only on jobs going overseas but a lot of erstwhile manufacturing work now being done by robots and other computerized machinery like CAD-CAM.  This is what used to be called automation, and its effect on manufacturing jobs was forecast back in the 50s and 60s.  Back then, manufacturing work itself was seen as having growing social and psychological problems.  The mindless repetitions of the assembly line was alienating and soul-destroying, besides factory work often being exhausting, dirty, unhealthy and dangerous.  The whole 9-to-5 was routinely portrayed as turning people into self-alienated robots, and self-destructive conformists. 

So while it is true that as President Obama says a healthy American economy and society must include businesses that make things--and there are lots of things to be made, especially in green energy industries--the current glorification of manufacturing does ignore some human and social problems and costs.  But one feared effect of "automation" may be less of a problem, though I don't know enough about it to be sure.  It was feared that with automation, workers would be even more distanced from involvement in their work--they would merely babysit the automation.  Any sort of involvement, even active monitoring, was considered less alienating.  As it turns out, at least some of computer technology enables what workers are left to be more involved in the manufacturing process.  They need to be more skilled, and more aware of the total process.  So they should be more productive and--don't tell any GOPers this--happier. 

But that still means fewer if "better" (and not necessarily better paying) jobs. As far as the effect of automation on employment, that was seen as inevitable, and so income supports such as the guaranteed minimum income were seriously explored, in theory.  That problem is of course much worse when even basic social support like the affordable healthcare act is castigated as some kind of satanic socialism.  We're a long way from seriously addressing this.

All of this can also be seen in the larger socioeconomic context of a much greater divide between the very wealthy and the not wealthy.  This interesting summary in the NY Times as well as other analyses that this has fundamentally changed American capitalism as well as American society makes this seem like a much bigger deal than it might appear.   I mean it's mind-boggling for me, sure.  I can't quite grasp that Casino Newt's biggest donor (of 10 or 11 million bucks) makes 3 million dollars an hour, or maybe it's $3 million a day.  It was a number too astonishing to take in, and I couldn't even figure it out, with my lame math skills.  I do know how all this makes me feel, which is that my current survival is by some sort of timewarp miracle, and that my near future survival is very very chancy indeed, and could be foreshortened pretty quickly. I don't even want to think about the long term (meaning twenty years say.)

This all adds to the more than occasional feeling that at some point--maybe even 1955--I got in my cardboard spaceship and set off on an intergalactic voyage.  Decades later I landed on a planet that looks a good deal like the one I left, but it isn't.  The planet is the same size, but several times as many people live on it, and the atmosphere is different (hotter.)  America is the same size (well, add Alaska and Hawaii) but there are twice as many people, and they appear to be twice the size.  Everything costs very much more but for some reason, I'm paid about the same as the 1970s, and less than the 1980s.  And that's just for starters, but apart from the mundane insight that things have changed, what I see suggests that the things that should have changed to address what has changed haven't changed, and left a lot of people feeling more than ordinarily alien in a familiar-looking landscape on a familiar-looking planet.   
   

Circus News

The most persuasive chatter I heard Monday about what Little Ricky Sanctimonious is up to suggests that he is pounding on Rabid Christian Right issues not only to assure those voters in Michigan (voting next Tues.) and Ohio that he's authentic but to get the attention of voters in the South who will be voting on Super Tuesday, March 6, outflanking Casino Newt, who has all but disappeared from the news and the polls.  

The problem for him might be that he's overplaying that hand in Michigan.  Richie Richney is closing the gap in the polls there and I wouldn't be surprised if by the weekend he's gone slightly ahead.  The perception game, which last week figured that even a close Richney victory would be spun as a defeat, has changed already, and with Little Ricky opening a bigger lead in the national polls,  right now any Richney margin of victory would be greeted as a big victory.  Of course, that's now, and the election is a week away.

What is perhaps more meaningful than this inside baseball stuff is that Ricky is articulating his version of a fundamentalist Christian line.  When he talked over the weekend about President Obama holding a theology that doesn't come from the Bible,  he was talking about the biblical command that humanity assert dominion over the Earth.  To Rick, any ethics that sees other lifeforms and the Earth itself as having any sort of "rights" or autonomy is anti-Christian.  It so happens that President Obama is not making that argument--his environmental policies have to do with sustainability and human health--the planet as what sustains human life.  Ricky is talking about me, more than about the policies of the Obama administration.

But that's par for the GOPer course.  They are all running against a fictional character, created largely by FOX News and Rabid Right institutions, who they cleverly named "Barack Obama."  Or rather, Barack Hussein Obama.

Arthur Schlesinger used to talk about the Party of Hope as the Party of the Future versus the Party of the Past.  That's never been more true.  GOPers as represented by Ricky are old wealthy white men who want to wring the last possible billions out of fossil fuels, the planet and the future be damned. They are culturally old white men losing control, trying to get back at women and people of color.  We maybe forget the racism that has often been uglier in urban areas like Detroit and  elsewhere in Michigan (where state appointed white dictators right now reign over black communities without elected representation) than in the deep South, where it is also alive and well, if camouflaged.

But women are already more than half the electorate, and the population.  They are the present.  People of color are moving towards a numerical majority, first in a few states, and then generally.  They are the future. The views of younger people of all races and genders are vastly different on these issues than the GOPer standard view.  As a rapidly aging white man, I've felt unfair assertions made, prejudiced analysis and other forms of prejudice towards Dead and Soon-to-be Dead White Males,  as well as the unpleasant intimations of obsolescence.  I hope some of us have more to say and do that's helpful, and one of those observations might be from the memories of more overt racism, and the signs that it is still alive and motivating.  It may not be the rationale, but it is providing a good deal of the energy.

Anyway, to get back to the circus itself, there's a debate in Arizona on Wednesday in advance of the Michigan and Arizona primaries next week.  It may be a very important one for these candidates.

A-OK

It was Tuesday morning, February 20, 1962 when John Glenn went into orbit and took America with him.  The launch was televised live, a matter of pride for the U.S. space program.  So I remember it all in black and white, what few real images there were. (The only camera in the spacecraft was the one Glenn brought with him.)  I remember the launch, and the film of the capsule being carried to the aircraft carrier after reentry.

Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth--he did it three times that day, in a trip that lasted just under 5 hours from start to finish.  Space was a new place then.  Psychologists worried that once someone went up they wouldn't want to come back.  Glenn's descriptions of sunsets--he saw four--suggested this could be true.  "As the sun goes down it's very white, brilliant light, and as it goes below the horizon you get a very bright orange color.  Down close to the surface it pales out into a sort of blue, a darker blue, and then off into black."

He reported on his physical status.  Doctors were worried about the effect of zero gravity on eyesight--a fear borne out just recently with astronauts returning from long missions on the international space station.  Then there were mechanical problems, and Glenn had to fly the capsule himself.  There was that suspense of the reentry and the seven and a half minutes of radio blackout, as Walter Cronkite explained that without its heat shield, Friendship 7 (named by Glenn's children) could burn up in the atmosphere.  We didn't know it then but that was a real worry--a faulty light on the capsule indicated the heat shield was loose.

John Glenn returned to earth the most lauded American hero since Lindbergh.  But he was also a global hero.  On his flight, everyone in the Australian city of Perth turned on all their lights because Glenn was sailing over them in darkness.  He reported seeing the lights.  Glenn's success and the enormous response to it gave NASA a major boost, and it was in the following fall that President Kennedy set the goal of sending a man to the moon and bringing him back by the end of the 1960s.

President Kennedy believed John Glenn himself was a national asset, and eventually Glenn became good friends with Robert Kennedy.  Glenn's first run for the Senate was cut short by an absurd bathroom injury, but eventually he won a seat from Ohio and remained in the Senate from the 70s through the 90s.  Glenn--who was called an old man when he orbited the Earth at the age of 40--got interested in issues of aging, and early on became a member of a special Senate committee on the subject.  In the late 90s he became curious about the effects of age and their relationship to the effects of being in space.  NASA was interested in the topic, too, and so John Glenn went back into space in 1998, on the Space Shuttle Discovery, at the age of 77.

The old man of the Mercury astronauts is now 90, and 50 years after the Friendship 7 orbits, one of only two of the original seven astronauts now alive.  There's a website here that has a great bio of him, detailed and fascinating, with video inserts.  There are stories today about the decline of the U.S. space program, NASA's nostalgia for better days, and the lack of new heroes.  But for me and those of us who remember this day--especially if you were young, as I was--there's something timeless about the excitement and wonder of this amazing adventure.  

Weekly News Roundup

Map is one of many Mapping Stereotypes at Alphadesigner.com. Click on it to see the Whole World.

Little Ricky Sanctimonious and The Immaculate Contraception ---and the Response

Fox News Moves Himalayas to the North (and South) Pole(s)

New Breeding Program to Keep Moderate Republicans from Going Extinct

Late-breaking news...here's the Google News summary of a Seattle newspaper story, in its entirety: Ron Paul gained 83 votes on Mitt Romney after a Republican presidential caucus in eastern Maine, where voting last week had been postponed... Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu says he's gay. No comments have been posted to this article.

When It's '64

Continuing good news for the American economy, and polls which calculate steep drops in GOP fortunes suggest that President Obama's reelection chances are looking better.  So pundits are focusing on  a number of precedents.  One, not surprisingly, is 2008, as polls indicate the 2008 Obama coalition is regathering (something I didn't necessarily expect until the fall.)  Another is 1996: an incumbent President with problems (in Clinton's case, a scandal and a little thing called impeachment) who gets an unexpectedly weakened and weak opponent, and whose reelection is hardly in doubt from the end of the conventions.

But the most tantalizing is suggested as Rick Sanctimonious becoming the GOPer nominee looks more than just possible, and as GOPers in Congress go full out on an issue that hasn't even been raised on the state level for a half century: contraception.  Clearly, Little Ricky is where the GOPer primary voter passion is, and he's ahead in Michigan--where a victory or even a very close second is now being interpreted as a near fatal wound to Richie Richney.    The idea is that Little Ricky as the nominee is so far right that he will lose spectacularly--that the operative election is 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost all but his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South.  Lyndon Johnson was elected in a landslide, and while the seeds of the Reagan brand of conservatism were sewn within the GOP, the immediate effect was to marginalize extreme conservatism even more.

So how does the analogy hold up?  LBJ was the sitting President, though it was because he was  vice-president when President Kennedy was assassinated just a year before.  Given the intense feeling in the country--almost unimaginable now--it's likely Johnson would have been elected anyway, to carry on the Kennedy legacy.  Goldwater won the nomination in direct opposition to a liberal Republican, Nelson Rockerfeller.  Extreme conservatism was not familiar to the broad American public, let alone to the GOPer establishment. 

Still, even though rightest rhetoric is more familiar now and some of it more accepted, the Sanctimonious brand of Rabid Rightitude is much more extreme than Goldwater, both in relation to the times and to the broad electorate.  Add to that his worse-than-Dole weaknesses as a candidate for the presidency, and an outcome similar to 1964 is very possible.  With Obama doing much better in the industrial heartland, he could end up carrying only a few states in the South, if that.

But for all the chatter this week--including the recount in Maine that might well take Richney's caucus victory there away--it is still more likely than not that Richney will wind up being the nominee.  The latest poll in Michigan shows him behind, but it's interesting that no pundit I heard pointed out that it has him behind by fewer points than previous polls.  His attack machine is just gearing up, and even with Ricky putting most of his big money chips into Michigan, Richney and his Pacs will still outspend him 2-1.  Plus Richney has a campaign infrastructure in the Super Tuesday states, and Little Ricky has no campaign infrastructure at all--not even a campaign headquarters. 

Richney could still win Michigan, and besides, I don't buy the pundit panic that Richney can't survive losing Michigan.  Though it does damage his chances on Super Tuesday, where his nightmare scenario has Little Ricky taking the Midwest and Casino Newt the South, if he wins enough on Super Tuesday, he could become Mr. Sort of Inevitable again.

On the other hand, he is already a deeply wounded candidate, and he may barely survive as a candidate even if he wins the nom.  His negative carpet bombing is hurting him almost as much as his targets, and Little Ricky is cleverly highlighting that as an issue.  Some candidates become better campaigners when faced with strong opposition, but so far that hasn't happened with Richney. 

So even though it's a long, long time until November, assuming slow but steady economic growth, and no major international crises (though that may not hurt President Obama anyway, when faced with these so obviously clueless warmongering demagogues,--by which I mean not only in Iran but in the GOP) we could see a 64-like outcome, even if Richney is the nominee.  You might remember that a few months ago none of these pundits were entertaining the possibility of an Obama landslide--just every other possibility.  But I was. 

By the way, it's also looking like this outcome could extend to the states, particularly now as the GOP is working hard to scare and alienate women, and there are some good Dem women candidates out there.  In the marquee race in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren was looking strong anyway, but when Sen. Scott Brown signed on to the bill that allows institutions and insurance companies to deny any category of medical coverage based on their assertion of a religious or moral objection, he just lost his seat.   

R.I.P.

Anti-apartheid activist, humanitarian, actress and one of the great voices of our time, rest in peace tonight, Whitney Houston.

Circus Days: Sneak Preview

Oh oh not again!---what's happening to Mr. Inevitable?  Even after questionable "victories" in Maine (maybe, Iowaitfor it!) and packing the CPAC poll, in the latest round of voter polls he's slightly to considerably behind in Michigan and nationally to--Little Ricky Sanctimonious!  Is Ricky the new star of the Big Top?  Cause no matter how many clowns crowd into the car, only one can come out in the end!  (Or is that a Ricky joke?)

But now that Little Ricky is on Richie Richney's radar (otherwise known as the once and future? Mr. Inevitable!) let the untold millions buy untold thousands of relentlessly negative ads and direct attacks against Sanctimonious!  Oh yes!

Problem is while the negative ads sink Richney's opponents, they also make Richney look like a very unpleasant guy.  His slide has not simply been in the GOPer primary polls--that would be politics as usual--but in his favorability generally.  He could win the nom in the process of becoming unelectable.

He does coin those phrases, though.  Most recently he announced his tenure as MA gov was "severely conservative." Lots of people are making fun of this, and expressing their discomfort, especially as it indicates Richney's inner disdain for the side he's trying so hard to be on--but nobody will quite say why.  The reason probably is that the best known use of "severely" in recent decades was as in "severely retarded."

As for Little Ricky, he wants to say this is a two-man race between him and Richney, which the national polls bear out, just as they said that about Richney and---name that tune.  The test will be Super Tuesday.  If Casino Newt can't win southern states (other than Georgia) then he really is toast.

Meanwhile Little Ricky is boxing himself into opposition to something that 99% of American women do, which is use contraceptives.  He's starting with threatening at least 52% of the electorate, including women Senators in his own party. 

At the end of this circus (don't worry, folks!  There's plenty more to come!) the GOPers will have a nominee, ready to start a new circus for the few months preceding the election, when all current signs point to President Obama's overwhelming reelection.  But stuff could happen outside the circus grounds to change the dynamic.

Now that congressional GOPers have made a deal to pass the payroll tax extension, unemployment insurance extension and the "doc fix" to Medicare, there's little major mischief they can initiate until after the election.  The foreseeable dangers come from outside the country, and they are big.  One is the European debt crisis which is still unfolding and could mean last minute setbacks to the American economy.  The second is Iran, and whether war breaks out there from Israeli air strikes or whatever, and oil shipping is disrupted. 

Either of those add big uncertainties, and shift the focus to some degree.  If Richney is the nominee, he has zero credibility on foreign policy, and he is so obviously untrustworthy that it's hard to see how anything offshore helps him.  Having been in the Senate, Sanctimonious can actually talk about foreign policy, and sound semi-sane, more credible than on domestic issues.  Still, it's hard to see America putting its fate in the hands of the guy in the sweater vest, vs. the guy who got bin Laden.  But stranger things have happened...under the Big Top!       

Priorities

News that congressional GOPers are caving and likely to cave some more on the middle class tax cut extension and unemployment insurance extension may remove the last crisis they can precipitate before November.  But that didn't make them any more receptive to President Obama's budget announced Monday, with its economic and social vision: cut the federal budget deficit by $4 trillion over ten years, partly through letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, but support the fragile economy recovery with investments in an America "built to last."

Those investments include education (particularly for community college job training), research and development, clean energy and infrastructure, including some $476 billion over six years for transportation projects.  Half the savings from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan go to such investments, the other half to the deficit.  Military spending is curbed, while more money would go to agencies protecting the American people against financial skullduggery and on environmental safety. 

It includes money for manufacturing research and incentives for manufactures to stay in the U.S.  Also more support for public housing and to combat homelessness.  Tax proposals include the Buffet Rule to make sure the very wealthy pay their fair share--even on capital gains, Richie Richney's source of annual nearly tax-free millions.

Also notable: a $61 billion tax on bailed-out big banks as penalties for their role in the Great Recession, which will provide funds to help homeowners facing foreclosures,  and eliminating tax breaks for oil and coal companies.

The budget was automatically castigated by GOPers and pundified as partisan.  But maybe it's worth asking some questions about what it really proposes.  For example:

Why is it partisan--let alone wrong--to propose spending on stuff that's needed anyway now and putting off deficit reduction until the economy is stronger, when that's the textbook right response according to nearly every mainstream economist?  And it's been proven to work?  While cutting spending has been proven to fail?

What's your alternative to rebuilding infrastructure?  Letting it fall apart, letting the country fall behind until it's a pathetic hasbeen country with a few wealthy enclaves?   What's your alternative to education and research and development?  Can you make a real case that oil and gas companies dripping in money need special tax breaks? Or that North America should cede the rapidly growing global clean energy industry to Europe and Asia?  Or that the extremely wealthy will be deprived if they pay fair taxes, so the country that makes their riches possible, and the planet that makes their lives possible, can get some badly needed attention?  And do you think that the big banks should never pay even a little for what they did, while everybody else suffers from what the banks did?  

As President Obama said to a northern Virginia audience on Monday, "it's not class warfare.  It's common sense."

Common sense is a bit radical in the best of times it seems, but right now it seems absolutely alien.  But it is gaining attention and support, as are President Obama's proposals on creating jobs, fair taxes and building a future that lasts.  That's quite possibly why GOPers are changing the subject to their tried and true "cultural" issues.  Except they've all been tried.  So now the GOP leadership in Congress as well as presidential candidates are doubling down on a war against contraception.  A war they are losing within their own party.  And on that subject, here's another list of questions.     

Join the Planet

My inbox is filled today with solicitations from several organizations to join a common effort to send a half million messages over 24 hours to the U.S. Senate opposing the Keystone Pipeline.

As important as this is-- preventing the pipeline and the associated massive climate pollution--perhaps almost as important is that this seems to be a real combined effort by environmental and related organizations, and supporting that is itself a vital step.

Maybe someday soon these organizations will combine on a positive program instead of only in opposition to destructive acts.  But for now, this is worth doing.  I've signed on.  It's very easy--just a couple of clicks--and yes, I expect it will result in more emails in your inbox, but the distinction between information and pollution on the Internet is sometimes wobbly.

Here's one of the links:   http://www.350.org/kxl


Update: More than 800,000 messages were delivered.

We Take Care of Our Own

The Boss' new video of his song, that the other boss is taking on the road for his reelection campaign.

The Friday News Roundup

In the headlines: Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi takes on Steven Colbert and his superpac.

Michelle Obama Bests Jimmy Fallon in Tense Competition

 A new biography of Albert Einstein reveals the overrated science geek had to write out his theory of relativity on paper because he was too stupid to invent Microsoft Word. "He had to scrawl everything out by hand, like some dumbo. It's a wonder people could even make heads or tails out of it without simple bullet points and auto-numbering."

An Oklahoma lawmaker introduces a bill defining life at the moment of ejaculation.  "Every sperm is sacred."

And NASA scientists announce that Intelligent, Condescending Life Discovered In Distant Galaxy.  Vulcans probably.

Update: The Friday joke.

Circus Maximus Extremus

The dimensions of Mitt Richie Richney's defeats Tuesday became clearer on Wednesday, and they are big tent circus size.  He not only lost the total contests in Missouri and Minnesota (where he is supported by former Governor Tim Palenta), he lost every county in both states.  He lost in Colorado with 35% of the vote, where he won in 2008 with 60% of the vote.  And turnout was significantly down.

So Wednesday Rick Sanctimonious was in church talking up one of his big issues--he's against birth control.  Not just certain forms of birth control, or the government or insurance companies or employers paying for birth control, or birth control for minors, or...no.  He's against birth control.  And because he is against birth control on moral and religious grounds, he wants laws against it.

This is a nation where 99% of the women use birth control, including 98% of Catholic women (for whom it is technically a sin each time they use it, inviting eternal hellfire.)  These are not hyperbolic estimates--these are polling stats.  And here's another: 53% of the votes cast in 2008 were cast by women.   And although I expect the Obama Administration to at least try to find a formula acceptable to the Catholic Church hierarchy, their interpretation that all hospitals etc. including those run by religious institutions serving the general public are required to cover contraceptives in health care plans for employees is also supported by a majority of women, including Catholic women.

Meanwhile, in the ongoing circus called Congress, GOPers are getting themselves in a fight with themselves on this issue, but more to the point, they are again playing political games with the middle class tax cut extension.  After all the claims that they just wanted to get it done, once again they can't get it together.

Hardly surprising then that Congressional approval is at 11%.  Oh, wait, that's an outdated poll number.  It's not 11% anymore.  It's 10%.  When asked in another poll, 43% agreed that a Congress comprised of members selected at random from telephone books would do a better job.  An additional 19% "weren't sure."

Big Bang Theory

Little Ricky shows President Obama how he won three GOPer elections by using his amazing sanctimonious crap gun!  Well, actually it's President Obama visiting the White House Science Fair and getting a demonstration of the amazing marshmallow-shooting gun.  For a video of the gun in action, right here.

Three Ring Circus Sanctimonious

As a taste of primary/caucus nights to come, Tuesday bore results from GOPer presidential contests in three states--and in all three rings stood the same winner: Little Ricky Sanctimonious. 

And at least two of them weren't even close.  Litttle Ricky won Missouri by 30 points over Richney, with Ron St. Paul in third.  It was even worse for Richney in Minnesota where Sanctimonious won handily, and Richney was third--behind Ron St. Paul!  As of this moment, Ricky is also pulling away in Colorado, up by 5 points. 

Some pundits opine that a big loser was Casino Newt, because he didn't enter or campaign in these contests (where no delegates were directly at stake) and Little Ricky has supplanted him as the conservative favorite.  I don't really buy that--any time Richney loses, Gingles is happy: it denies Richney momentum and perhaps delegates.  It remains to be seen if Ricky can compete with Gingles in the southern Super Tues primaries next month. 

But there's no doubt that the biggest loser was Richney.  Mr. Inevitable failed to close the deal in three swing states with his GOPer base.  What that means for the general is debatable.  But what it means for the circus is--the clown shows continue, bigger and badder than before!

The Richney Stratagem

How can Richie Richney keep moving farther and farther to the right, and expect to win Independents in a general election?  His favorables are tanking, and as the economy improves, he's losing his central argument.

The answer to the first is that he has to win the nomination to get into the Big Game of the general election.  And like any team getting into such a game, there's always a chance that something unforeseen will happen, and the weaker team will win.  But there's another reason as well.

That reason is Richney's access to money.  It's been estimated that some $18 million has already been spent in the GOPer primaries on negative ads, most of it by Richney.  That of course is more money than most people will see in a lifetime, or in several generations.  And it buys a lot of ads.  But it is insignificant in terms of the amount of wealth that the Richney class has to spend without pain, maybe even without noticing, if he gets into the Big Game. 

They can do it now through a number of ways, most of them involving Superpacs.  Yesterday the Obama campaign announced that it would no longer oppose contributions to Superpacs on its behalf. They see what's coming, and they know they have to be able to play defense.   They see what the Richney strategy is becoming: get into the general election whatever the cost to Richney's public image, and then throw hundreds of millions of dollars into negative ads to demonize Obama, so the only issue will be whether the American people will send Satan back to the White House, or elect the other guy, who they don't know much about but at least he's not Satan.

 Forget the economy, the environment, the non-Richneys, the returning troops, forget everything else except how much hate can be generated against Obama, especially in the last two weeks before the election.  The Richney Stratagem is the best financed hate machine in American history.

Austerity and Stupidity

Family budgets have to balance, at least eventually (the huge credit card debt that American families were carrying contributed to the Great Recession, though it wasn't the major cause.)  Families have few options when the bills are bigger than the paychecks.  Most can do very little about increasing the pay checks. So they have to cut back on spending.

We understand economics on larger scales with this in mind, but it is a flawed comparison in significant ways.  Businesses can increase prices a lot easier than people can increase their pay.  And government can raise taxes.  It's right and proper that citizens expect government to cut back spending if possible rather than raise their taxes.  But that's not really what the tax debate is about anymore, not even globally.

It's about the very rich, led by the banks and the institutions they control, vigorously fighting paying any taxes, let alone just and justifiable taxes, by buying officeholders and manipulating public opinion as well as by other means.  So the U.S. government is running deficits while cutting back spending, at precisely the time that this spending is most needed to stimulate the national economy.  And the same is true elsewhere.  And if this keeps on, we're all going to pay mightily.  Another recession so soon is going to mangle a fragile economy, and further wound government's ability to deal decisively with crisis.

What am I talking about?  Here in the U.S., the cutback in government spending has meant layoffs, which has kept the unemployment rate higher.  The U.S. has had almost two years of private sector job growth, but job losses particularly by state and local governments have continued.  The better but still low growth rate would be much higher if government wasn't slowing the economy down by not employing people, and not spending on infrastructure at even the normal replacement rate.  Employment means people are able to buy stuff, and it doesn't matter where the employment is.  Government jobs are often middle class jobs, and also often employ a fairer mix of races and genders.

  Austerity in this case is stupidity.  Not only does the economy require the multiplier effect of government investment in what we need done anyway, but the jobs that are being shed include police, firefighters and first responders--which hurts everyone in the present--and teachers as well as educational institutions, which hurts the future, and the ability of the country to prosper.  Failure to invest in infrastructure, emergency prepardedness, public health, are all bills that will come suddenly due in the worst possible circumstances.  Just in dollars alone, the Congressional Budget Office has calculated how the economy is going to be depressed by less government spending.

Why this austerity?  Politically, it has come down to a now very obvious protection racket for the rich.  All that is required, in many of the states as well as on the federal level, is fairer taxes of the very wealthy and the very very very wealthy.  Now a tax increase for less than 1% of the population would seem an easy decision for the 99% to make.  But that 1% owns the banks and major corporations, including the media.  It funds the economics departments and business schools, the sweet conferences and perks for academic economists, the outrageously paid speaking gigs for failed politicans, not to mention the lobbying public relations firms and think tanks, and now the Superpacs.

Austerity is out to destroy the U.S. economy and therefore its social cohesion in another way.  Right now Europe is going through its economic crisis, and the big banks that control that economy are insisting on government austerity.  So governments shed jobs and stop buying as much from the private sector, unemployment goes up, people have less money to spend, and the economy spirals down.  

And the situation is particularly bad in Greece.    "The Troika" -- the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the European Central Bank -are insisting on severe austerity, not only in government spending, but in the country, including slashing the minimum wage by 25%.  Greece is already reeling from past austerity measures.  This is the prescription by which the IMF and the World Bank has ruined economies throughout the world, increasing their debt.  These are the Shock Treatments that are central to the Shock Doctrine as N. Klein describes  it in her book.

But this time the shock is apt to be felt in North America.  Greece is facing another default crisis in March.  If the troika doesn't back off its ruinous austerity demands, the ripples will be quickly felt here, and the U.S. economic recovery could be over.  It's a moment very much like just before a war starts.  It's much easier to start a war than to stop one, as we've found to our considerable pain.  It's like that with a global economic crisis.  The default of Greece, or European crisis generally, is one of two predictable threats to American recovery (the other is war involving Iran.)  And like most tragedies, we're walking into this one with minds closed and eyes wide open.        

The Climes They Are A-Changin

The weather is fine.  Creepy fine.  Our North Coast rainy season so far has amounted to about a week, instead of 3 months.  Sunday in Arcata was as warm as it "normally" gets in summer, but sunnier. 

It's been like that elsewhere in the U.S., where winter hasn't happened.

Meanwhile in Europe it's unusually and in some cases catastrophically cold.  Italy is colder than "normal," the UK got a sudden big snowstorm, but the worst is central Europe.  The Ukraine has seen temps dip to 33 below, and more than 130 resulting deaths have so far been counted.

Some folks, even some in the media, have noticed that climate scientists predicted this kind of thing as a result of global heating. “Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”

But I'll bet some are also wondering what I'm wondering: if it's this warm in February, what's it going to be like in July?

Good Job

The job numbers released on Friday were uniformly good news for the economy.  Employment was revised upward for November and December, and January saw the addition of 243,000 jobs and another drop in the unemployment rate to 8.3%.

This led to the highest stock market total since before the Great Recession began in 2008, and the highest NASDAQ (tech stocks) in 11 years, since 2000.

At the Washington Post Ezra Klein concluded: "The bottom line is that this isn’t just a good jobs report. It’s a recovery jobs report. It’s showing the sort of numbers that win elections."

Rightward Politico quotes a banker: "We appear finally to be in an economy where hiring begets spending, which begets corporate profits, which begets hiring. That’s the virtuous cycle we need.”

 All the internals of the jobs report were good, as jobs were added in all sectors. Though President Obama warned that these numbers "will go up and down" in the coming months, he challenged Congress to feed the recovery and don't "muck it up."  That certainly means passing the middle class tax cut extension and it also means other programs such as the ones for returning veterans
he announced Friday.

Whenever there was an economic downturn, my father would say the same thing: they oughta revive the CCC.  In his 20s he worked in the Civil Conservation Corps and its successor, as the Great Depression met World War II.  Now after all these years he may get his wish: President Obama has proposed a new CCC of sorts, but brilliantly--in political as well as economic terms--he's made it for veterans.  Plus other proposals involve supporting local firefighters (as in Arlington VA, where he spoke on Friday) and others who are endangered by state and local budget cutbacks.  Here's the White House release on the subject:

"First, President Obama is working to help state and local communities hire veterans to work as first responders. The administration will make available $166 million in 2012 Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Grant funding and $320 million in 2012 Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grants and award that money with a preference to communities that recruit and hire post-9/11 veterans. The President's budget for the 2013 fiscal year will include additional $5 billion for these grant programs.

Second, the President is working to develop a Veterans Job Corps conservation program that will put up to 20,000 veterans to work over the next five years. They'll work to restore habitats, eradicate invasive species, maintain public lands, and operate public facilities.

Third, President Obama wants to expand entrepreneurship training opportunities for service members and veterans. Back in August, the Administration established a two-day course in entrepreneurship as part of the Transition Assistance Program with the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, along with the Small Business Administration. The SBA also offers an eight week online training program that will teach the fundamentals of small business ownership to more than 10,000 veterans every year."

"I'm Crazy and I'm Right"

Presenting Rick Sanctimonious in the  funniest Bad Lip Reading video since Michelle Bachmann.

The Circus of Overreach

Sometimes the circus act more than fills the big top--it's over the top, and the tent collapses.  That may be happening now, as the extent of overreach becomes obvious. It's becoming especially obvious in the fatal mixture of big money politics by the obscenely wealthy and Rabid Right ideological politics.

For example, the Religious Right Meets Class War of money for poor women's health in a society that makes health depend on wealth. The reaction from the Susan B. Komen Foundation decision to stop its longstanding financial support for Planned Parenthood breast cancer screenings continued to get even stronger on Thursday, with several prominent resignations from the Foundation, protests from U.S. Senators and many individuals--and this story that fleshes out the right wing political agenda behind the foundation's act.  Friday Update: It appears that the Foundation has reconsidered and will continue funding the Planned Parenthood screening programs, although some warn that it's not clear how solid this commitment is now.

The continuing influence of money on political policy got the curtain torn back in Florida on Thursday.  Florida is just one of the states where an extreme Tevangelical plus Big Money agenda has been trying to destroy political, organizing and women's rights since that combination took over their governments in 2010.  It is distinguished only by how the obscenely wealthy Rick Scott (probably the wealthiest pol short of Rich Richney) bought the governorship with his own millions.  And now it has revealed just how organized the changes in these states have been.   The rightward American Legislative Council has been providing direction and "model bills," but though their influence has been hotly denied, that's going to be harder when a Florida legislator forgot to remove their mission statement from their template bill that she introduced as her own.

In the GOPer presidential circus, news organizations continue to study the report of superpac donors, fleshing out the extent to which just a few of the obscenely wealthy--just 41, by one count--are supplying Richney's millions.  But in a revelation that surprisingly didn't get headlines Thursday, the Richney campaign has 14 lobbyists bundling cash for his campaign, including at least one who lobbies for foreign nations--including a Middle Eastern oil-producing member of OPEC.   So big foreign money buying access and self-interest joins big corporate money and big money in general in trying to buy the U.S. presidency.

Richney is easy enough to parody, simply by sticking to the facts: "you and a few buddies with names like T. Coleman Andrews III made pots of dough by starting up a venture-capital firm with other people’s moolah and then spent the rest of your life living off the "carried interest" proceeds at a low, low, low tax rate of 15 percent, upgrading your $12 million vacation home in the ritzy San Diego suburb of La Jolla and running for president because you can’t get elected to any other office..."

It could be that Richney is getting so defined right now that he won't be able to overcome this impression later.  But a lot can happen, and a lot of bucks are yet to happen. Big money, already way too influential, is trying to buy the place outright, and that campaign is just getting started.

To Whom Much Is Given

Things have changed a lot since I was a student at Sacred Heart School, St. Paul's School, the Most Blessed Sacrament Cathedral School and Greensburg Central Catholic High School.  Though I'm no longer intimately acquainted with it, it seems the American Catholic Church has changed, and the role of religion in politics has vastly changed.  When I was at Central Catholic, the second Catholic in the history of the U.S. to be nominated for President, Senator John F. Kennedy, made a major speech to Protestant clergy asserting that, no, he wasn't going to take orders from the Pope, that he was not going to let his religious affiliation interfere with his oath as President of all the people.  Today, presidential candidates seemingly must prove that they will take orders from their religious affiliation in order to qualify for office.  That's not just a little different.

The Catholic Church's doctrine on contraception hasn't changed, though perhaps their attitudes towards it and other such issues has.  (It was also then, as it is now, the most widely ignored ban among Catholics.)  The federal government decision on requiring American hospitals and other health care institutions caring for the general public, regardless of the institution's religious affiliation must offer insurance that covers contraception I believe one that would have been understood in the Catholicism of my youth.  We used to hear the phrase, you can't legislate morality.  That a Catholic hospital is required to cover contraception services does not require anyone to accept those services if they violate their religious beliefs.  Sin, forgiveness and redemption are individual matters, for freedom to sin or not to sin under any circumstances is pretty the whole point.  (For other views on this recent policy decision, here are some collected by Andrew Sullivan, himself a Catholic, with links to even more discussion.)

In the Catholicism of my youth--and to some extent today as well--there were different degrees of emphasis on moral lessons derived from the teachings of Christ and his disciples, leading to different approaches to public policy and action.  But major lessons were felt to support what may be considered "liberal" policies (and "liberal" was an acceptable and often admirable description then, particularly in the years of Pope John XXIII, one of the great voices of the 20th century.)

I mention this now because the major lessons President Obama described as the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday that drew from his Christian faith were lessons I learned then, through Catholic teaching.  They remain bedrocks for me, especially as they are supported by so many other teachings,  from many religions as well as from ethics that require no divine authority.   Yet these moral statements were either dismissed or ignored, or interpreted only in the politics of Washington.

Love your neighbor as yourself, and the action program resulting from that--otherwise known as the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount--and "the least of these," as well as the verse President Kennedy quoted--"To whom much is given, much is required"--were commonplace in my Catholic education.  Are they so radical now?

There's no question that they are relevant to the moment--that's the point of moral standards, that you apply them to situations of the moment.  And President Obama did that in talking about them, as he said that he does in informing his actions.  The video of this speech speaks volumes.  Wearing soft brown in contrast to his usual dark blue or black, the President was speaking from the heart--speaking strongly, but seeming to know how vulnerable he was being.

Dorothy Day

"We can’t leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel -- the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action -- sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance."

Dorothy Day--how brave to mention her, and a radical Catholicism that eclipsed even mine in high school, though for some reason a subscription to her newspaper that I never bought, The Catholic Worker, followed me from residence to residence for years. The others he named suggest how his faith informed his community organizing days, and vice versa.  But it is equally important that with each example from the Christian Bible he gave, President Obama noted parallels in other religions (although he neglected to mention the very strong Buddhist call for compassion.) 

"Treating others as you want to be treated. Requiring much from those who have been given so much. Living by the principle that we are our brother’s keeper. Caring for the poor and those in need. These values are old. They can be found in many denominations and many faiths, among many believers and among many non-believers. And they are values that have always made this country great -- when we live up to them; when we don’t just give lip service to them; when we don’t just talk about them one day a year."

He began his remarks with a plea for the relevance of these ethics rather than parading political affiliations with particular ideologies endorsed by particular religious groups. "At a time when it’s easy to lose ourselves in the rush and clamor of our own lives, or get caught up in the noise and rancor that too often passes as politics today, these moments of prayer slow us down. They humble us. They remind us that no matter how much responsibility we have, how fancy our titles, how much power we think we hold, we are imperfect vessels. We can all benefit from turning to our Creator, listening to Him. Avoiding phony religiosity..." 

The heart of his message, simple and yet complex in its rejection of a certain kind of religiosity while grounding his moral beliefs in his faith:

"Now, we can earnestly seek to see these values lived out in our politics and our policies, and we can earnestly disagree on the best way to achieve these values. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “Christianity has not, and does not profess to have a detailed political program. It is meant for all men at all times, and the particular program which suited one place or time would not suit another.”

Our goal should not be to declare our policies as biblical. It is God who is infallible, not us. Michelle reminds me of this often. (Laughter.) So instead, it is our hope that people of goodwill can pursue their values and common ground and the common good as best they know how, with respect for each other. And I have to say that sometimes we talk about respect, but we don’t act with respect towards each other during the course of these debates.

But each and every day, for many in this room, the biblical injunctions are not just words, they are also deeds. Every single day, in different ways, so many of you are living out your faith in service to others."

Though I do not share his faith, I share his values, and I recognize their grounding in the Catholic teachings that informed JFK and--though he was either ridiculed or ignored for his statements on faith and works--Senator John Kerry when he ran for President in 2004. 

Certain clergy were asserting that the Constitution is a Protestant document (another way of saying that America is a "Christian" nation within their narrow definition of Christianity) during JFK's campaign in 1960.  Catholics in those days largely saw the separation of church and state as protecting them.  Now it is being challenged in ways I wouldn't have believed possible, with the Catholic Church among the challengers.  But these so-called religious wars should not distort or distract from the moral basis of our public life.

You know what day it is---no, not that one, Bill Murray fans.  It's James Joyce's birthday, of course.

Never heard of him?  Well, you've heard of him, but...With Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and the books more people are likely to have actually read, A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and Dubliners, he was once revered as the greatest writer of the modern age.  But his reputation has been in something of an eclipse.  That's partly been due to his own descendants, or at least the ones controlling his estate.  They've apparently raised litigiousness to a high modernist art.  They've reputedly tried to stop or control every excerpt, quote, fact, observation or mention of his name for years.  I read somewhere that his work was dropped from an important anthology of Irish prose because of their mercurial demands.  They apparently drove the scholarly biographer of his daughter Lucia half mad, and seriously weakened her otherwise excellent book--and then they sued her anyway.  That she finally won may or may not have slowed them down.

Joyce did enter popular culture for awhile, with the many Bloomsday readings in June.  And reputedly the family put a stop to that.  Notice I keep saying reputedly.  They've reputedly intimidated everybody, and may have intimidated away their future income in the process.

 It may well be that Ulysses is not the greatest novel of the 20th century after all.  Then again, we're in a philistine age.  A Portrait of the Artist will always remain an important book to me, personally and as a writer.  I revered his dedication to his craft, as chronicled with such grace in the classic Richard Ellman biography.  Now there's a new biography, which sounds pretty awful.  There really aren't many good new literary biographies.

 Maybe Joyce's example did me more harm than good, but so what?  His birthday was important to Joyce--he tried to schedule the publication of his books for this date, and I believe he succeeded with Ulysses at least.   So even if he screwed up my life, got me drunk too often and encouraged me to stay poor, while setting standards I couldn't match so I never published even a little novel. He still was a friend.  So happy birthday, James.  Your day will come again.

Rich Richney and His Class War

How rich is he?  Double the combined fortunes of the last eight Presidents.  But it's not just money.  He's rich in his soul.  And not in a good way.  In the eye of a needle way.  Tough to get into heaven.  Richney can't even get to Earth.

Rich Richney, the likely GOPer candidate for Prez, thinks rich.  This means that he lives in a world where it is accepted, in fact expected, that he would structure a $100 million trust fund for his sons so exactly zero taxes would be paid on it, in defiance of the U.S. gift and inheritance taxes that lesser mortals (including mere millionaires) must pay.

Rich Richney has the eyes and heart of extreme wealth.  He managed to mangle his post-Florida message  about being for the middle class with the immortal statement, "I'm not concerned about the very poor."  It could be called a kind of Freudian slip, except that he repeated it.  Twice.

But the GOPer class war for which Richney is the poster boy goes beyond Richney's announced tax reforms, which would mainly benefit him and his insulatedly superrich ilk.  For example, another Wednesday story that seemed to be about the culture war, or the war against women: the major foundation (run by a GOPer, the senior vp of which is a Rabid Right pol) that cut off funds to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening.  Of course it is Rabid Right politics and culture war and war against women, but it is also and perhaps more basically class war.  Because rich women will still get their breast cancer screenings.  They don't need Planned Parenthood. The women who won't get breast cancer screenings are poor women who depend on Planned Parenthood--but who don't concern Rich Richney.  Class war is a subtext elsewhere as well.

Not that all this is new.  We've been here before.  Only now much, much worse, and getting worse than that.

Superpacs reporting their funding sources showed many million dollar donations to Richney's superpacs, especially from the Wall Street class.  They helped Richney crush the otherwise execrable but merely sort of rich Casino Newt with three or four times the few millions Newt got from his sole Casino daddy (who is himself so rich, somebody figured out, that the $10 million he threw Newt's way works out to be a proportion of his income that for someone making the U.S. average would amount to $45.)  Brute money as brute force.  Welcome to Obscenely Rich Guys United.

The class war of the Richney class, which plays the poor GOPer Tevangelical base like a fiddle (a base fiddle?), adds geometrically greater warping to the already skewed values of our decadent "democracy."  The rich may be different from you and me.  But the Richney rich are different from you and me and the Vulcans and Klingons. 

How all this plays out is described in this classic commentary by Lawrence O'Donnell, which uses an interlocking tale involving American Airlines, pensions, the federal government, and Bain Capital to expose the values universe we're trying to navigate.            

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Enjoy Your Planet

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

As part of our after-circus cleansing, here's this video.  It's pretty spectacular full screen, the bigger the better.  Personally the time lapse was sometimes too much--I'd rather linger in some of those spots, with this gorgeous resolution.  But when it gets to the meteor shower--well, the experience wouldn't be the same without the waiting in the cold, the looking in the wrong place and looking back too late, the sudden surprise, the hot tea, etc. but I have to say, it was very satisfying to see a night's worth of shower in this compressed form.  Anyway, enjoy your planet.

At the Circus: Total War

With a turnout lower than the last presidential primary, Florida GOPers favored juggler Richie Richney over high wire artiste Casino Newt.  About 40% of Richney's voters also wished for a different candidate.  Newt Gingles took the Tevangelical north of the state, while Richney prospered in places that will probably go Dem in the general.

But the move of the night was Gingles talking about his Inauguration Day, unveiling "46 States to Go" signs, and failing to congratulate Richney in his speech, or concede that Richney had won, or to call Richney afterwards.  In case you didn't get the message, that's tripling down on common courtesies he meaningfully violated.

Richney slimed Gingles with $16 million in negative ads ( over 90% were negative, and less than 1% made any positive case for Richney.) It was an ultra rich man's demonstration of the power of money to destroy someone (It turns out that Richney is twice as rich as the last eight U.S. Presidents were at their richest, put together.)  It's the cynical horror to teach a merely rich man like Gingles where the real power is.

 Gingles clearly is in no mood to forgive or forget.  If there was doubt that the revenge thesis offered yesterday by several pundits was accurate, it's looking pretty certain now.  Gingles got the deeply Rabid Right vote, did his racist dog whistles in his speech to further confirm his hold on the Grand Old Confederate White Southerners Party, which votes on Super Tuesday in March.  By asserting that this was a campaign of People vs. Money, he signaled that even if the Casino millions falter, he'll keep going, debate by debate.  Rick Sanctimonious and Ron St. Paul seem comfortable in staying in the race as well.

Though some MSNBC commentators thought Gingles was suggesting he might run anyway if the GOPers don't nominate him, I'm less certain of that--he spent the first part of his speech talking about the need to have a conservative GOPer majority in Congress.  But it is hard to see Gingles endorsing Richney. Even former McCain pro Steve Schmidt, not exactly a raver, predicted that the nomination process was now "total war" in the GOP.

Now the action goes to arcane caucuses,  maybe leaving a few weeks for circus goers to wipe the elephant shit off their faces.  On the other hand, this is a circus without limits--it probably doesn't even seem all that weird anymore than FOX news would slime the latest Muppet movie for being anti-capitalist, and the latest critique of the credibility of FOX News would come from Miss Piggy.      

Pet Sounds

People's feelings about each other are often conflicted.  But people's feelings about their pet animals mostly are not. They may have complex feelings about their dogs or cats, but mostly those feelings are strong, direct and pure.  Especially under stress, almost everything can come down to that relationship---as it did in this story about a young actor who felt forced to have his dog put down, and soon after ended his own life.

  People have very direct relationships with their pets, and they tend to judge other people on how they behave towards pet animals. So while the politics of pets is presented lightly, people don't take the topic lightly.  It's a test of basic humanity.

The story of Mitt Romney's summer vacation many years ago has been quietly making the rounds.  He drove 12 hours with his family in the car, and the family dog in an air-tight carrier on top of the car.  The dog got sick, and his diarrhea dripped down the car windows, so Romney pulled off the highway at a gas station, hosed down the car and the dog in the carrier, and resumed driving.

The reaction has been growing, with stories often referring to this Dogs Against Romney website. 

That was the context when David Axlerod tweeted a photo of President Obama with his dog Bo with the message, "How loving owners transport their dogs." 

Cute, right?  But another story suggests how potentially powerful this really is--a story of wanton cruelty that explains the mindset of the Rabid Right to those who don't get it when illustrated by stories involving just people, or even less impressive, politicians.  I won't reproduce the photo here, but it's in the story: the children of a campaign manager for an Arkansas Democratic congressional candidate came home to discover their pet cat dead on their front porch, obviously murdered (the story gives the graphic details) and with the word "liberal"written across its body.

What this says about what humans are capable of is depressing enough, or how far we have not come in being civilized and empathetic.  But the message of where Rabid Right politics are is pretty clear.  It says it for some people perhaps even more directly than attempted assassination, or the vile and racist words of Republican officials including their party chair, or the implications of the cruel policies these folks favor. 

How we treat animals is often better than how we treat each other, and certainly better than we treat the rest of life and the future of life on this planet that provides us with our life.  So the effects of certain policies and beliefs, as well as the hearts of those that sell them, is exposed through attitudes and behavior towards the pets that bless us with their presence.      
  

At the Circus: Now It's Personal

His Romneyness is ending his Florida campaign with triumphant condescension, while Casino Newt is continuously livid.  Though some observers suggest the race has tightened in the past 48 hours (the final tracking poll has Romney's margin down to single digits from the 10 to 15 points most recent polls average) it seems that the relentless attacks on Gingles have again taken their toll.

And it has been one seriously ugly circus down there.  Romney spent 16 million dollars trashing Gingles, who spent 5 million dollars trashing Romney.  Romney had five media ads for every one of Newt's.  He trashed Newt in person as well as through his superpac millions.  And Newt is not taking it well.  By several accounts, it's gotten personal.  No fellow candidate has ever expressed much affection for Romney, but Newt is channeling as much hate as he can possibly muster for a white non-Democratic non-President. 

So despite the expected Florida loss, Gingles has vowed to go on to the convention--and though all candidates say this, John Heilemann suggests he means it, for one central reason : "so much has he come to despise Romney and the Republican Establishment that has brought down on him a twenty-ton shithammer in Florida, and so convinced is he of his own Churchillian greatness and world-historical destiny. The same antic, manic, lunatic bloody-mindedness that has made him such a rotten candidate in the Sunshine State may be enough to keep him the race a good long time."   Chris Matthews at MSNBC expects Casino Newt to stay in "long enough to exact revenge."

Though the "establishment" attacks were fierce again last week, they may have goosed Tea Party types to coalesce around Gingles.  Herman Koch-Cain endorsed him, as did Queen Sarah and her chancellor/court jester Todd.  She even said something about Romney being Stalinistic.

So two things are happening here: the Final Conflict between the establishment GOP and the Tevangelist neolithic conservative GOPers, and since these folks are so used to scorched earth tactics and getting off on Armageddon, it could be like Biblical.  That's unlikely to enhance their chances in November.

The second thing is already hurting them, in poll after poll: the mudfest, plus the actual mud they are feasting on, is sending negative ratings for all the candidates and GOPers in general soaring.  Not to flip flop or anything but soaring negatives means positives falling down down down, all the way to hell.